Title: The Dynamical History of Chariklo and Its Rings

Abstract

Chariklo is the only small solar system body confirmed to have rings. Given the instability of its orbit, the presence of rings is surprising, and their origin remains poorly understood. In this work, we study the dynamical history of the Chariklo system by integrating almost 36,000 Chariklo clones backward in time for 1 Gyr under the influence of the Sun and the four giant planets. By recording all close encounters between the clones and planets, we investigate the likelihood that Chariklo’s rings could have survived since its capture to the Centaur population. Our results reveal that Chariklo’s orbit occupies a region of stable chaos, resulting in its orbit being marginally more stable than those of the other Centaurs. Despite this, we find that it was most likely captured to the Centaur population within the last 20 Myr, and that its orbital evolution has been continually punctuated by regular close encounters with the giant planets. The great majority (>99%) of those encounters within 1 Hill radius of the planet have only a small effect on the rings. We conclude that close encounters with giant planets have not had a significant effect on the ring structure. Encounters within the Roche limit ofmore » the giant planets are rare, making ring creation through tidal disruption unlikely.« less

@article{osti_22663630,
title = {The Dynamical History of Chariklo and Its Rings},
author = {Wood, Jeremy and Horner, Jonti and Marsden, Stephen C. and Hinse, Tobias C., E-mail: jeremy.wood@kctcs.edu},
abstractNote = {Chariklo is the only small solar system body confirmed to have rings. Given the instability of its orbit, the presence of rings is surprising, and their origin remains poorly understood. In this work, we study the dynamical history of the Chariklo system by integrating almost 36,000 Chariklo clones backward in time for 1 Gyr under the influence of the Sun and the four giant planets. By recording all close encounters between the clones and planets, we investigate the likelihood that Chariklo’s rings could have survived since its capture to the Centaur population. Our results reveal that Chariklo’s orbit occupies a region of stable chaos, resulting in its orbit being marginally more stable than those of the other Centaurs. Despite this, we find that it was most likely captured to the Centaur population within the last 20 Myr, and that its orbital evolution has been continually punctuated by regular close encounters with the giant planets. The great majority (>99%) of those encounters within 1 Hill radius of the planet have only a small effect on the rings. We conclude that close encounters with giant planets have not had a significant effect on the ring structure. Encounters within the Roche limit of the giant planets are rare, making ring creation through tidal disruption unlikely.},
doi = {10.3847/1538-3881/AA6981},
journal = {Astronomical Journal (Online)},
number = 6,
volume = 153,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2017},
month = {Thu Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2017}
}

We construct dynamical black ring solutions in the five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell system with a positive cosmological constant and investigate the geometrical structure. The solutions describe the physical process such that a thin black ring at early time shrinks and changes into a single black hole as time increases. We also discuss the multiblack rings and the coalescence of them.

We study the dynamics of the Magellanic Clouds in a model for the Local Group whose mass is constrained using the timing argument/two-body limit of the action principle. The goal is to evaluate the role of M31 in generating the high angular momentum orbit of the Clouds, a puzzle that has only been exacerbated by the latest Hubble Space Telescope proper motion measurements. We study the effects of varying the total Local Group mass, the relative mass of the Milky Way (MW) and M31, the proper motion of M31, and the proper motion of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) onmore » this problem. Over a large part of this parameter space, we find that tides from M31 are insignificant. For a range of LMC proper motions approximately 3{sigma} higher than the mean and total Local Group mass >3.5 x 10{sup 12} M{sub sun}, M31 can provide a significant torque to the LMC orbit. However, if the LMC is bound to the MW, then M31 is found to have negligible effect on its motion, and the origin of the high angular momentum of the system remains a puzzle. Finally, we use the timing argument to calculate the total mass of the MW-LMC system based on the assumption that they are encountering each other for the first time, their previous perigalacticon being a Hubble time ago, obtaining M{sub MW} + M{sub LMC} = (8.7 {+-} 0.8) x 10{sup 11} M{sub sun}.« less

Solar activity and helioseismology show the limitation of the standard solar model and call for the inclusion of dynamical processes in both convective and radiative zones. In this paper, we concentrate on the radiative zone. We first recall the sensitivity of boron neutrinos to the microscopic physics included in solar standard and seismic models. We confront the neutrino predictions of the seismic model with all the detected neutrino fluxes. Then, we compute new models of the Sun including a detailed transport of angular momentum and chemicals due to internal rotation that includes meridional circulation and shear-induced turbulence. We use twomore » stellar evolution codes: CESAM and STAREVOL to estimate the different terms. We follow three temporal evolutions of the internal rotation which differ by their initial conditions: very slow, moderate, and fast rotation, with magnetic braking at the arrival on the main sequence for the last two. We find that the meridional velocities in the present solar radiative zone are extremely small in comparison with those of the convective zone (smaller than 10{sup -6} cm s{sup -1} instead of m s{sup -1}). All models lead to a radial differential rotation profile in the radiative zone but with a significantly different contrast. We compare these profiles to the presumed solar internal rotation and show that if meridional circulation and shear turbulence were the only mechanisms transporting angular momentum within the Sun, a rather slow rotation in the young Sun is favored. We confirm the small influence of the transport by rotation on the sound speed profile but its potential impact on the chemicals in the transition region between radiation and convective zones. These models are physically more representative of the real Sun than the standard or seismic solar models but a high initial rotation, as has been considered previously, increases the disagreement with neutrinos and the sound speed in the radiative zone. This present work pushes us to pursue the inclusion of the other dynamical processes to better reproduce the observed solar profile in the whole radiative zone and to better describe the young active Sun. We also need to get a better knowledge of solar gravity mode splittings to use their constraints.« less

It has been recently shown that near-Earth objects (NEOs) have a temperature history-due to the radiative heating by the Sun-non-trivially correlated to their present orbits. This is because the perihelion distance of NEOs varies as a consequence of dynamical mechanisms, such as resonances and close encounters with planets. Thus, it is worth investigating the temperature history of NEOs that are potential targets of space missions devoted to return samples of prebiotic organic compounds. Some of these compounds, expected to be found on NEOs of primitive composition, break up at moderate temperatures, e.g., 300-670 K. Using a model of the orbitalmore » evolution of NEOs and thermal models, we studied the temperature history of (101955) 1999 RQ{sub 36} (the primary target of the mission OSIRIS-REx, proposed in the program New Frontiers of NASA). Assuming that the same material always lies on the surface (i.e., there is no regolith turnover), our results suggest that the temperatures reached during its past evolution affected the stability of some organic compounds at the surface (e.g., there is 50% probability that the surface of 1999 RQ{sub 36} was heated at temperatures {>=}500 K). However, the temperature drops rapidly with depth: the regolith at a depth of 3-5 cm, which is not considered difficult to reach with the current designs of sampling devices, has experienced temperatures about 100 K below those at the surface. This is sufficient to protect some subsurface organics from thermal breakup.« less

We determine the Hubble expansion and the general cosmic perturbation equations for a general system consisting of self-conserved matter, ρ{sub m}, and self-conserved dark energy (DE), ρ{sub D}. While at the background level the two components are non-interacting, they do interact at the perturbations level. We show that the coupled system of matter and DE perturbations can be transformed into a single, third order, matter perturbation equation, which reduces to the (derivative of the) standard one in the case that the DE is just a cosmological constant. As a nontrivial application we analyze a class of dynamical models whose DEmore » density ρ{sub D}(H) consists of a constant term, C{sub 0}, and a series of powers of the Hubble rate. These models were previously analyzed from the point of view of dynamical vacuum models, but here we treat them as self-conserved DE models with a dynamical equation of state. We fit them to the wealth of expansion history and linear structure formation data and compare their fit quality with that of the concordance ΛCDM model. Those with C{sub 0}=0 include the so-called ''entropic-force'' and ''QCD-ghost'' DE models, as well as the pure linear model ρ{sub D}∼H, all of which appear strongly disfavored. The models with C{sub 0}≠0 , in contrast, emerge as promising dynamical DE candidates whose phenomenological performance is highly competitive with the rigid Λ-term inherent to the ΛCDM.« less